ARTS . Art

Full-Court Prestige

Rich Westcott's bio of roundball legend Eddie Gottlieb is a slam dunk.


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Published: Apr 22, 2008

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Eddie Gottlieb was a one-man front office — "owner, general manager, coach, player, entrepreneur, promoter, booking agent, schoolteacher and a sporting goods salesman," according to local writer Rich Westcott in The Mogul (Temple University Press), his new biography of the South Philadelphia sports legend. Westcott (The Phillies Encyclopedia, Veterans Stadium: Field of Memories) offers a long-overdue look at Gottlieb, who brought the Warriors (and, later, the 76ers) to Philadelphia and helped establish pro basketball at a time when Big Five college hoops at the Palestra was dominant.

Westcott does a superb job illustrating just how informal and low-budget the early NBA was. The Warriors, for example, opened their 1955 regular season against the Lakers at Lincoln High in the Northeast. According to Villanova/Warriors great Paul Arizin (who wrote the book's foreword just before his death in 2006), the Warriors' home court, Convention Hall, "had the worst dressing room in the world. There were no hooks for your clothes. ... Each dressing room ... had only a single shower. We had to use it, and so did the referees." And for the first three decades of the NBA, Gottlieb figured out annual schedules by himself every summer, using only a pen and paper. When the league approached IBM in the '60s about having computers generate their schedules, a Big Blue executive shrugged, "Keep things the way they are. [Gottlieb] does a better job than we could."

The Mogul also details Gottlieb's career as owner of the Negro League Philadelphia Stars, examining the complexity of Gottlieb's relationship with black athletes. While he was also the Harlem Globetrotters' promoter in the 1940s, Gottlieb expressed reservations about the NBA integrating in the 1950s. ("Your players will be 75 percent black in five years," he warned the owner of the Knicks, "and you're not going to draw people.") By the end of the decade, however, Gottlieb was instrumental in the Warriors landing Wilt Chamberlain.

Westcott tracks down most of Gottlieb's surviving friends and players (he died in 1979 at age 81) to present an unusually well-rounded portrait. While Gottlieb's varied life could probably encompass several volumes, The Mogul gets enough of the man between two covers.

Rich Westcott will read from The Mogul Wed., April 30, 7 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.